MH370 may have turned south earlier than thought

Canberra - The search area for a missing Malaysian plane in
the southern Indian Ocean has been refined based on the latest analysis, while
the investigation into how the plane came to crash cannot proceed until the
wreckage and black boxes are recovered, officials said on Thursday.

Australia's Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said analysis
of a failed attempted satellite phone call from Malaysia Airlines to Flight
370, which disappeared on 8 March, "suggests to us that the aircraft might
have turned south a little earlier than we had previously expected".

The overall search area still remained unchanged, he said.
He did not elaborate on how that analysis was achieved.

Cost agreement

Truss and Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai signed
a memorandum of understanding on Thursday on co-operation in the search for the
missing Boeing 777 as it progresses to the expensive next phase. The agreement
shares the ongoing costs between the two countries.

The airliner disappeared with 239 people aboard after flying
far of course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Liow said investigators had advised that success of the
undersea search for wreckage and the aircraft's back boxes with cockpit voice
recordings and flight data was crucial to solving the mystery of the disaster.

"The investigation cannot continue without the search
result," Liow said.

"We need to find the plane, we need to find the black
box in the plane so that we can have a conclusion in the investigation,"
he added.

Malaysia, as the country where the Boeing 777 was flagged,
has overall responsibility for the crash investigation. But Australia has
search and rescue responsibility for the area of the Indian Ocean where the
plane is thought to have crashed 1 800km off Australia's west coast.

The search could take up to a year to scour 60 000 square
kilometres of the Indian Ocean seabed and cost $48m (A$52m).

Before the underwater search starts, two survey ships are
mapping the entire search area.

Chinese Vice-Minister of Transport He Jianzhong, who also
attended the Canberra meeting, said the ministers had all agreed that the
search will not be interrupted or given up. Most of the lost passengers, 153,
were Chinese.